In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce yet another "independent journalist". She's an American Canadian conspiracy theorist and propagandist, Eva Bartlett. Eva is part of the "may be partially or wholly under the editorial control of the Russian government" gang.
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Like so many of these so-called journalists, she started as a Palestine activists, and she was a campaigner for the International Solidarity Movement. Bartlett visited Gaza several times, reported about the situation there in her blog.
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She also did speaking tours around North America. Eventually she moved on to Syrian civil war.
These days Bartlett is very much in the same group of al-Assad and Putin apologists as the Grayzone blogger Max Blumenthal, Sonja van den Ende and Vanessa Beeley.
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She is one of the most popular propagandists of this group, and her videos have been viewed millions of times. Bartlett rose to notoriety in 2016, when she was doing some Russia and Syria sponsored reporting from Syria. She stated in a video that there's "overwhelming ...
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...support" for president al-Assad in Syria, and that the rescue organization White Helmets was Western propaganda and that "no one in eastern Aleppo has heard of them". She accused the NGO of recycling actors and footage.Ironically she's done this exact thing in her reports.5/10
In the same footage she suggested that the al-Quds hospital bombing was propaganda and never occurred. This message was of course spread by RT and Sputnik. Syrian government also staged a discussion between Bartlett and the UN.
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All of these statements were naturally lies and were debunked by several outlets. For example, the advocacy group The Syria Campaign and the US-based think tank Atlantic Council have debunked many of Bartlett's lies about the White Helmets.
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As history has shown, these "independent journalists" often support most totalitarian regimes around the world: in 2017 Eva visited North Korea, and suggested that most of the misery and poverty in there are a result of American imperialism.
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Since Apr, 2022, Bartlett has been reporting on Ukraine, sometimes selling her coverage of the events to RT. In Jul, 2022, she was one the speakers at the International Public Tribunal on Ukraine, a propaganda event to for defaming Ukraine and Ukrainians.
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Eva Bartlett has lived in Russia since 2019. She has 48k followers on Youtube and almost 130k followers on Twitter, which makes her a relatively popular pro-Russian propagandist.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, made together with chef invité @Martinlaineolen, we discuss the extensive links between pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Russian officials and intelligence operatives, and how Western politicians reinforced these links.
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While MAGA influencers remain silent on Epstein, pro-Kremlin propagandists and bot farms have expectedly launched an anti-Ukraine online operation, spreading fake narratives that connect Ukraine, its politicians, and the late sex trafficker.
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But the emails paint a very different picture: in reality, Epstein had very close connections with Russian officials and intelligence operatives, and even built bridges and arranged meetings between MAGA figures and the Kremlin.
In this 5th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss something that sounds great in theory, but was completely turned upside-down by the tankie kind of vatnik: anti-imperialism. More consistent anti-imperialists call this the “anti-imperialism of idiots”. 1/5
“Anti-imperialism” was popularized by Lenin, who saw imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism. Ironically, the largest empire is now… Putin’s Russia, proud heir to both Lenin’s Soviet Union and to the Tsarist Empire. 2/5
Indeed, Russia is an empire that is still ruled by a de facto all-powerful Tsar, that still proudly flies its imperial flag, that still dreams of expanding its already huge territory through brutal conquest and colonization. 3/5
In this 4th Debunk of the Day, we’ll refute an absolute classic of vatnik BS, the crown jewel of peak dishonesty: whataboutism.
Now, not everything that looks like whataboutism is wrong. Seeking consistency or comparing actions or responses is normal. 1/5
But when someone pulls some completely unrelated event, that happened to completely different people, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, you know what you’re dealing with: a crass denial of the problem at hand, a bad-faith attempt to derail the topic. 2/5
Logic or chronology plays no role here, nor your opinion on these other topics. You could be the staunchest critic or supporter of these other actions thrown into the discussion, it doesn’t matter. It is irrelevant whether these other things are true or not, or bad or not. 3/5
In this 3rd Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about… “ending” the war by surrendering or ceding territory.
Nearing four years of the 2-day “special military operation”, Russia is desperate to obtain through other means what they failed to conquer on the battlefield. 1/5
An endless army of vatniks therefore tries to demoralize both Ukrainians and supporters.
They sound noble: “anti-war” or concerned about the fate of Ukraine’s civilians, soldiers and cities. They claim that if we just stop fighting or helping, this horror would magically end. 2/5
What they never mention is… WHO started the war, WHO murders Ukrainians, WHO destroys Ukrainian cities: the same monsters they suggest Ukrainians be at the mercy of. Surrendering wouldn’t end the atrocities of the occupation, it would enable them. Surrendering wouldn’t even…3/5
In today’s Debunk of the Day (2), we’ll look at… nuclear blackmail. Vatniks love using Russia’s nuclear threats as a reason for surrendering or for not lifting a finger to help Ukraine: “see, they have nukes, we have to give them whatever they want”.
The argument is absurd: 1/5
Nuclear deterrence has been a reality for decades. Both the US and Russia have lost wars without resorting to nukes. We are not submitting to the whims of Pakistan or North Korea either. For vatniks, it’s just an insidious way of siding with Putin. 2/5
We can’t just give in to the Kremlin’s nuclear blackmail, to the threats their officials and propagandists make five times a day to scare us into letting them have something they know perfectly well is not theirs, with no limit to their appetite. 3/5 vatniksoup.com/en/nuclear-thr…
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce a Ukrainian “scholar” and social media activist, Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta). She’s best known for spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives online, along with a habit of spotting neo-Nazis everywhere in Ukraine.
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Marta hails from Ukraine, where she studied history at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. She received her PhD in history in 2010. Her academic work focused on gender-based violence and wartime atrocities, including publications on sexual crimes in occupied Ukraine.
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She is currently working as a visiting Assistant Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at Clark University in the US. According to the center’s website, Marta teaches courses on antisemitism, racism, and gender-based violence in armed conflicts.